This study examines the ways in which the moral community is
"talked into being" in relation to crime, and the objects of
concern that typically occupy its attention. It maps the imagined
moral universe of the virtuous and the criminal and charts the
relations between these two groups in the "history of the present."
It examines the calls to action which symbolically endow the moral
community with power. And it looks at the character and content of
collective moralizing.
The source materials are commentaries about crime and criminal
justice appearing in selected newspapers across the Americas. The
moral "talk" found there is stylized, routine, trivial and
occasionally dramatic. It looks nothing like the weightier
renderings of morality that derive from the reconstruction of a
particular "ethic" or from the systematic probing of values and
moral reasoning. And its fuzzy, offhand, unexceptional and
frequently unsystematic nature makes it a difficult candidate for
explaining either stability or change in crime policies. But moral
talk has intrinsic importance as the creator and sustainer of an
imagined moral community, a community that symbolizes the existence
and vigor of morality itself and confers a crucially important
identity on its self-proclaimed members. And moral talk reveals
inherent intersections between normative, empirical and technical
discourses, highlighting the relationships between morality,
science and social engineering. Thus, a prosaic, instrumental,
model of morality is particularly strong in North America, but only
found in a more abstract form in Latin America, where it sits
alongside a stirring vision of morality, more directly anchored in
virtue.
Research on social problems, moral panics and the sociology of
morality has largely overlooked the type of moral discourse studied
here. While emphasizing the culturally contingent nature of the
findings, the conclusion reflects on their significance for
understanding the nature of moralizing, the artifacts of talk and
the construction of identity.
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